


Mother of Snow

by RaisinFlames



Series: Elder Scrolls Zero [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-01-29 01:25:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12619984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisinFlames/pseuds/RaisinFlames
Summary: The day the Snow Prince fell, the sun opened.A tale of war, love, myth, and tragedy; as seen from the eyes of Finna, an adolescent Nord squire, and the fabled Snow Prince, hero of a weakening and forlorn people -- and their last hope.[Loose liberties may be taken with the lore and worldspace; all inaccuracies to be regulated with grains of salt.]





	Mother of Snow

_O'er the peaks and o'er the chutes,_  
_O'er the high arm stacks_  
_Home awaits with dinners to eat_  
_And Shor the vict'ry of man!_

The chants echoed over the campsite, and the parade of men and women, armor clinking and slapping against their numerous adornments, huddled like a swirl of flakes against one whistling gale.

A girl, young and with dark blonde wafts of hair that sloped over her head and across the backs of her shoulders, ran through the white frost armed with spirited pupils that shook away the clattering chill. "Mom," she yelled, through cupped hands. A few heads would draw her way, but none shared either spirit or pupil. Her lids pulled at her brow. "Mom!"

Mid-yodel, she collided into the back of a burly axeman. He turned, spotting her and laying a hand on her shoulder to keep the bumbling shield sister in place. "Finna!" He lobbed his neck down, the sight of his scarred brow even clearer up close, through the sockets left behind the iron headpiece. "Slow down! You'll fall on the striking point of a spear with those feet, gal!"

"Don't call me that, uncle Ulfgi." Her reply came adamantly and she shrugged off the man's staunch hand. Straight at him she looked, with as much evenness as the still growing Nord could muster, and he to her. "Where's Mom?"

Tearing his amused gaze away from the girl, he rose and caught the attention of a warrior warming by a crackling wood pile. She pointed to a tent by the shade of the towering hill face. Finna offered a nod of thanks, and began treading away.

"Hold it, gal."

The girl's look was one of ice. Ulfgi smiled apologetically.

"Shield sister." He continued with a shift in his drawl. "Remember," his boorish voice took on the form of a storied old uncle, like the Ulfgi she remembered in the radius of a scanty furnace and fresh mead back home, the Ulfgi that roared odes to the gods in half-drunk bellows with father and his brothers, the Ulfgi that knew much, and remembered more. It was this Ulfgi that fixed his eyes upon her, amusement whittled, and intoned, "Your mother is but human too."

Once released from Ulfgi's grip, the Nord daughter made haste for the tent.

Something sounded wrong, she thought.

And she could never let that happen. Not again.

"Mom!" Before she could even blink, she had pulled the flap of the tent to a warm lick of tempered candles. She was staring at the faces of Turda, Melkea, and sure enough, her own chestnut-haired mother. All assembled with complacent smiles, a far cry from the ominous news she had expected. "Mom?"

"Surprise!"

"Happy birthday, child!"

"What's wrong, my little sabre?" Finna just blinked up at her mother, while a humble roll sat on a plate, set on the surface of a flimsy table. She sat cross-legged before it, while the other two stood with welcoming twinkles in each of their eyes.

"She must have forgotten, Jofrior," Tulda crossed her arms, candle at the point of her elbow.

"The child is getting that old already, aye?" Meglyn winked.

However, the grizzled woman hadn't been talking about lapses in memory. She had meant the pools of water that formed at the corners of her young squire's eyes. Very briefly, and but for a moth's wing-clipped flight. But undeniably they formed, and tersely they were discarded, for the girl quickly wiped them away, and cast that fervent, strong-willed look she was always so bent on upholding back across the tent and to her fellow soldier, warrior, mother.

Human.

Men. Women. As they all were. As they all were fighting, that very moment, for. For more than just perpetual battle. Merit-granting conquest. But this. Rolls on a plate, on crooked tables, inefficiently lit tent sites. A coil of candle smoke, through which you could trace the thick and sturdy hands of each battle-ready vanguard. For refuge from the arena, the endless death and ravaging and rinse and repeat, that went on beyond -- in the normal world. In the only world she knew.

Finna managed an uneven smile of her own, but a smile nevertheless. And with the hooking arms of Tulda and Meglyn around her, the pair promptly jibbing and jiving in opals of teasing conjecture, she entered the tent and sat across her mother, tearing a chunk of the cream topped bread. There.

Aside her mother of snow.


End file.
